Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block is a must-have because it does a great job at VERY SIMPLY explaining how you can make that new baby of yours stop crying his eyes out.

Even better, it does it in tiny little short paragraphs, is printed in big type, and even contains a line drawing or two. This makes it a particularly manageable read for women in the throes of pregnancy-brain and men in the throes of … well, every stage of their life.

(I am not saying this to be mean to men. Men are lovely. If they weren’t, so many of us wouldn’t have gone and married them and had their babies. Men are not as stupid as we often claim, either. But ladies, I have said it before, and I will say it again: in general, Dads aren’t that interested in reading all this parenting crap as Moms are. They don’t like being told what to do, or how to do it, even when that “it” is taking care of a baby, even when, and especially if, they haven’t a clue how they’re supposed to do that.)

By now you will have noticed that I’m a little bit OCD. Not enough to counter-act the effects of housing four kids in my personal space — I can count seven choke-able, non-appropriate-for-children-under-three-items on the floor right this moment just begging the boys to eat them (POLLY POCKETS, I AM CALLING YOU MOTHAF****S OUT !) — but enough to believe that there is a RIGHT WAY and a WRONG WAY to do most things.

This is NOT to say that MY RIGHT WAY is the same as YOUR RIGHT WAY. As far as parenting choices go, we are all basically in this thing alone (despite what the great big wide kumbaya-mother-blogging world would have you believe), especially when it’s 3 am on a Tuesday night and you are up for the fifteenth time servicing water or potty or “my nightlight stopped working” requests … so who am I to say you shouldn’t a) do whatever it takes to soothe your kids back to sleep or b) lose your temper all over them and let them sob their eyes out for the next three hours because you just don’t have another ounce of Earth Mama left in you?